Rating: ★★★★☆ Tags: Mystery Detective, General, Fiction

NICK DUNNE
THIRTY DAYS AFTER THE RETURN
A
my thinks she’s in control, but she’s very wrong. Or: She
will be very wrong.
Boney and Go and I are working together. The cops,
the FBI, no one else is showing much interest anymore. But
yesterday Boney called out of the blue. She didn’t identify
herself when I picked up, just started in like an old friend:
Take you for a cup of coffee?
I grabbed Go, and we met
Boney back at the Pancake House. She was already at the
booth when we arrived, and she stood and smiled
somewhat weakly. She’d been getting pummeled in the
press. We did an awkward, group-wide hug-or-handshake
shuffle. Boney settled for a nod.
First thing she said to me once we got our food: ‘I have
one daughter. Thirteen years old. Mia. For Mia Hamm. She
was born the day we won the World Cup. So, that’s my
daughter.’
I raised my eyebrows: 
How interesting. Tell me more
.
‘You asked that one day, and I didn’t … I was rude. I’d
been sure you were innocent, and then … everything said
you weren’t, so I was pissed. That I could be that fooled. So
I didn’t even want to say my daughter’s name around you.’
She poured us out coffee from the thermos.
‘So, it’s Mia,’ she said.

---

‘Well, thank you,’ I said.
‘No, I mean … Crap.’ She exhaled upward, a hard gust
that fluttered her bangs. ‘I mean: I know Amy framed you. I
know she murdered Desi Collings. I 
know
it. I just can’t
prove it.’
‘What is everyone else doing while you’re actually
working the case?’ Go asked.
‘There is no case. They’re moving on. Gilpin is totally
checked out. I basically got the word from on high: Shut this
shit 
down
. Shut it down. We look like giant, rube, redneck
jackasses in the national media. I can’t do anything unless I
get something from you, Nick. You got 
anything
?’
I shrugged. ‘I got everything you got. She confessed to
me, but—’
‘She 
confessed
?’ she said. ‘Well, hell, Nick, we’ll wire
you.’
‘It won’t work. It won’t work. She thinks of everything. I
mean, she knows police procedure cold. She studies,
Rhonda.’
She poured electric-blue syrup over her waffles. I stuck
the tines of my fork in my bulbous egg yolk and swirled it,
smearing the sun.
‘It drives me crazy when you call me Rhonda.’
‘She studies, Ms Detective Boney.’
She blew her breath upward, fluttered her bangs again.
Took a bite of pancake. ‘I couldn’t get a wire anyway at this
point.’
‘Come on, there has to be something, you guys,’ Go
snapped. ‘Nick, why the hell are you staying in that house if
you aren’t getting something?’
‘It takes time, Go. I have to get her to trust me again. If

---

she starts telling me things casually, when we’re not both
stark naked—’
Boney rubbed her eyes and addressed Go: ‘Do I even
want to ask?’
‘They always have their talks naked in the shower with
the water running,’ Go said. ‘Can’t you bug the shower
somewhere?’
‘She whispers in my ear, on top of the shower running,’
I said.
‘She does study,’ Boney said. ‘She really does. I went
over that car she drove back, Desi’s Jag. I had ’em check
the trunk, where she swore Desi had stowed her when he
kidnapped her. I figured there’d be nothing there – we’d
catch her in a lie. She rolled around in the trunk, Nick. Her
scent was detected by our dogs. And we found three long
blond hairs. 
Long
blond hairs. Hers before she cut it. How
she did that—’
‘Foresight. I’m sure she had a bag of them so if she
needed to leave them somewhere to damn me, she could.’
‘Good God, can you imagine having her for a mother?
You could never fib. She’d be three steps ahead of you,
always.’
‘Boney, can you imagine having her for a wife?’
‘She’ll crack,’ she said. ‘At some point, she’ll crack.’
‘She won’t,’ I said. ‘Can’t I just testify against her?’
‘You have no credibility,’ Boney said. ‘Your only
credibility comes from Amy. She’s single-handedly
rehabilitated you. And she can single-handedly undo it. If
she comes out with the antifreeze story …’
‘I need to find the vomit,’ I said. ‘If I got rid of the vomit
and we exposed more of her lies …’

---

‘We should go through the diary,’ Go said. ‘Seven
years of entries? There have to be discrepancies.’
‘We asked Rand and Marybeth to go through it, see if
anything seemed off to them,’ Boney said. ‘You can guess
how that went. I thought Marybeth was going to scratch my
eyes out.’
‘What about Jacqueline Collings, or Tommy O’Hara, or
Hilary Handy?’ Go said. ‘They all know the real Amy. There
has to be something there.’
Boney shook her head. ‘Believe me, it’s not enough.
They’re all less credible than Amy. It’s pure public opinion,
but right now that’s what the department is looking at: public
opinion.’
She was right. Jacqueline Collings had popped up on
a few cable shows, insisting on her son’s innocence. She
always started off steady, but her mother’s love worked
against her: She soon came across as a grieving woman
desperate to believe the best of her son, and the more the
hosts pitied her, the more she snapped and snarled, and
the more unsympathetic she became. She got written off
quickly. Both Tommy O’Hara and Hilary Handy called me,
furious that Amy remained unpunished, determined to tell
their story, but no one wanted to hear from two unhinged